Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Does the left care about solving these problems?
That's distinct from ideology, but I would hope so. Also a question that's impossible to answer without further defining 'solving' or 'trying to solve.'
The most progressive cities in the country have no solution to homelessness (maybe you'd say "at least they're trying," but SF's efforts do not look like they're trying to solve it so much as a bureaucracy trying to make sure everyone is able to skim a few dollars from the effort, in perpetuity
There are a large number of programs, which, as you've pointed out, don't seem particularly effective. And as you expected: at least they're trying.
The stories, though: Ruthless Shkreli wannabes jacking up meds prices, leading to mental breakdown and eviction! White supremacist patriarchy refuses to employ trans women of color, of course they have to work the streets! These people just need a helping hand to be productive members of society #latestagecapitalism
I don't profess to be an expert on homelessness, but I assume it won't be that easy.
The answer to drug use appears to be legalization and "freedom."
Legalization of less addictive substances. Probably methadone clinics, heavy investment in therapy/support groups for addicts, nationalized healthcare, etc for the heavy drugs. The ideology feels a bit lighter on this issue, but I'm not sure what people would say if you asked them.
The answer for social alienation? Crickets.
Probably true. I'm curious what people would answer if I asked them.
Assimilation is racism. Speaking of racism, is the left trying to fix that one or reinvent it?
Fix, by their definitions.
Spreading democracy is colonialism.
Depends. A righteous crusade to rescue trans, gay, women and people of color from the privileged classes probably wouldn't register as colonialism.
Frankly, yeah, "the right" sucks right now.
I'm not even trying to make a value judgment. I'm trying to make an argument that they need to think bigger, stop being reactionary and provide ideological explanations/solutions to problems in society.
When I think visions of the future, I think people like Dryden Brown and Justin Murphy. They have visions for the future; they are also, basically, nobodies.
Thanks for the recommendations!
"Believe in the righteousness of your cause, regardless of actual effects" is not exactly a glowing endorsement.
Well, of course they should do better at trying to actually trying to track down the effects of their policies. In their defense, a lot of these problems are fairly complex and intractable even for people who study it full-time.
What is their vision of the future? Does it make any sense? I have no clue what their vision for the future is. Maybe the Democrats have a vision for the next five minutes, they have a vision for the resistance or the revolution, but that's not comes to my mind when I think of a vision for the future.
Perhaps 'the future' is the wrong concept to use. It's fairly rooted in and focused on the problems of the present, more so than the utopians dreaming of metropolises on Mars.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Come on man, as an argument, this is "Nuh-UH" and "No U". If the left manages to lose whatever cosmic thing you think they're winning, it will be because they followed policies informed by arguments as shallow and pathetic as this.
I'm skeptical I could make any argument along these lines that would impress you. I'm doubtful that my comments that are critical of the left or wokeness are any more incisive or insightful, but they never draw the same accusations, so /shrug. Most top level posts are naked culture warring cutting the other way that again, never draw this objection. To some extent accusations of being a shallow culture warrior is just table stakes for participating in this community regardless of how careful I am. If I truly took all Your (not you personally, the royal You) criticism to heart I would never say anything, and indeed, I delete half my abortive comments without them seeing the light of day. Maybe you'd like that better. I suppose if I got enough replies like yours I'd stop writing long before I became Darwin 2.0, but at least some people seem to find the discussion useful.
Anyways - many of you are taking this as some value judgment. That I'm trying to say 'This is why I'm a blue blooded Democrat damnit, because those dumb-dumb Republicans can't come up with a vision beyond robbing the poor and cutting taxes on the 1%.' Rather, I'm trying to make an argument along these lines although no doubt much less skillfully. I'm also trying to leave an opening for people to tell me I'm misunderstanding the problem, that this is the vision being articulated by so-and-so and I've just never encountered it, or that I'm typical-minding half the country who don't respond to the same incentives I do. I've gotten precious little of the former, maybe half the replies are the latter, and half the comments make me think I'm right and reinforce my belief.
All I can offer is to do my utmost to give your perspective a fair shake.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Or (3) righteously toppling a would-be tin-pot tyrant who had a (metaphorical) boot on their necks.
I think it's more likely to be a Straussian conjugation of (2).
I recommend being cautious when speaking to someone else's internal state and motivation.
True, I try to be mindful that I'm typical-minding conservatives.
Many (initially) successful revolutions started with no unified positive vision except "the status quo is intolerable." And few groups manage to implement their vision in the event anyway.
When the boog boys are kicking my door down I'll die yelling about how their reactionary vision is inadequate to win popular support.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
(Maybe had a boring Friday?)
Occam's razor would suggest that I'm a loser eating cheetos in my mom's basement, arguing on the internet in between World of Warcraft raids.
Maybe sanity (like your clinics and therapy) can win out in other places, but the way ever progressive move slides towards Berkeleyism doesn’t give me hope for that.
Oh, uh, I definitely wouldn't call it my approach or particularly effective. The block hosting the methadone clinic at my alma mater had the worst reputation on campus and was always a mess. Then again, who knows what the counterfactual would be like?
I've only driven through San Francisco once so you would know better than me.
I’m going to keep picking at this, because I think asked a good question but your defenses of the left are so “damning with faint praise” that I’m still not sure exactly what you’re expecting to find.
“Tell a compelling story, regardless of reality” and “fix, by their definitions” is surprisingly effective for modern progressives, completely horrifying, and a cheer for nonsensical propaganda. I don’t think that’s actually what you want from the right or from a competing utopian vision.
You likely won't find much of substance after scratching the surface, I'm afraid. I identify with the left because they speak to the problems I care about; if someone had a realistic alternative that was more effective without committing atrocities (i.e. gassing the homeless to clean up the streets) I'd be on board. If rationalism could actually proselytize to the masses to focus more on data and results, we might get somewhere. Like, you say you care about black homeownership? How do you not know that it's largely unchanged in 50 years despite all the policies we've tried? Maybe we shouldn't hold such strong opinions about things we haven't seriously researched in any meaningful capacity...
“Tell a compelling story, regardless of reality” and “fix, by their definitions” is surprisingly effective for modern progressives, completely horrifying, and a cheer for nonsensical propaganda. I don’t think that’s actually what you want from the right or from a competing utopian vision.
Good, bad, it seems like reality, no? Many people are rabidly woke. People want to do the right thing, people want to feel good about themselves and many need ideology as a part of that identity. I'd like us to all have a nice dispassionate discussion about how to run society led by the relevant technocrats who haven't been captured by one interest or another, but that isn't the world we live in - and many problems are big and complex enough that even the people who study them 24/7 don't know the answer.
That being said, I don't think the liberal project has been a failure on every count. Poverty is down. Global poverty and death/disability from many preventable diseases is way down. 20 million fewer uninsured Americans from 15 years ago. Broad social acceptance of interracial and same-sex marriage. Sometimes you tell a compelling story and the world is a better place. Sometimes, you tell a compelling story that diverges from reality and you bonk your head against the wall for a decade or two before society finally lumbers back to the drawing board.
Really elaborating on my views would take a longer post than this.
then I’ll assume you’re an accelerationist.
Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. Although Kendi doesn't get my goat the way it does many people here - I'm not sure I agree with his worldview, but it's certainly an interesting one that makes me question how far I'd be willing to go for equality. I strongly support affirmative action and even quotas for some positions (largely political), but I'm not interested in Harrison Bergeroning society into homogeneity. Many of the quotes that do circulate (I mostly remember the 'white people are literally aliens' one) are cherry-picked to generate ridicule and outrage.
Don't think I've read the other authors.
Redefining evil as good, and telling a good story about it, should not be our goal.
Agreed.
Progressives have been able to tell themselves what is apparently a convincing story on racism, that it can only be answered by EVEN MORE RACISM- this has, to date, spawned a bunch of grifters, an increased murder rate, and more misery for everyone, making the world worse for everyone that’s not profiting from the grift. You can call it “at least they’re trying” if you want, but that just sounds like an action bias; their “trying” is actively counterproductive.
The failures are what gets highlighted, because we're American and our failure mode is to bitch about every single thing the government and opposition do endlessly (as opposed to China whose failure mode is the global times assuring me everything is fantastic until the day there's no food on the shelves and the condo I paid for is never going to be built). As I've said, I don't think it's all been negative. As for the actual, undeniable failures like the mess of a crime rate or vaccines ending the pandemic, I think they'll collapse under their own weight - as they should! Just always more slowly than I'd predict, the way I thought everyone would give up on mask mandates and lockdowns after widespread vaccination in summer of 2021.
And of course, some failures whose causes aren't so tightly connected to their consequences will slip through the cracks to plague us for decades to come. Such is life.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Would you take any such argument seriously?
Of course not, I'm just a mindless Pelosi-bot regurgitating whatever normie talking-points the NYT and George Soros tell me to.
Because it's kinda hard to treat 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' from the guy who's gone whole-hog on "Do you want to drive over to my apartment and put a bullet in my head, or set off a bomb at my workplace?" as someone who would.
I don't see why those two are incongruent. The spirit of '76 is practically synonymous with civil war/violent revolution/boogie boys in some parts.
As for the actual violent rhetoric, it seems to have quieted down a bit. Particularly here, but I also think in the broader political arena.
((Even for this specific case. It's not like libertarians and the Gray Tribe haven't had long arguments over the scope of 'dangerous' or dangerous public information!))
So, if I'm understanding correctly, you're upset at the drive-by about 'libertarians slinking away' from Musk when 90% of the post was about conservatives? Okay. For all my very limited criticism of libertarians, I think they do have a fairly grand vision for the future. A Randian utopia where personal freedoms allow the ubermensch to throw off their shackles and accomplish wonders. I don't see this much on the right these days; they seem to want just as much government regulation and interference as the left does.
I'll note that this, likewise, doesn't look like an unusually Positive Vision -- indeed, even if Scott hides it, I'd argue it's more 'turn back the clock' than a lot of mainstream conservative ones!
Hardly. I used that as an example of Scott giving commentary or advice to Republicans, not necessarily the object level arguments themselves. I'm trying to express that my intention wasn't to put down conservatives but rather to point out a real deficit in their platform, and that I think filling it in would benefit the entire country regardless of political affiliation. Perhaps my position in this community just precludes me from making that argument, or I just don't have the chops. Who knows.
((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))
I'm sure you have some lovingly nursed examples ready-at-hand, but regardless, this one misses the mark. I've written a novella-sized series of replies to your previous objections, 2-3 novellas to FC, another few for professorgerm, others that I can't remember at the moment. When I get 10 replies to something I write I just physically can't give all 10 an effortpost, and if I did anything less, you'd be sitting there smugly accusing me of low-effort posting.
Other times, I find people offensive or off-putting enough that I leave the conversation rather than say something that would get me banned. As you already know, I'm not particularly intelligent; you should add thin-skinned and poor impulse control to your list, and laud me for knowing when to leave the conversation rather than writing something that would get me banned.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I don't think you ever needed my help on that front, friend.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
One promises world of peace, freedom, prosperity and progress beyond our imagination, the other promises ... other things.
Thanks! I'd never seen that comic before, I'll take a look.
"Of course there will be no poverty and homelessness in libertarian society, because all poor and homeless will be, hahaha, PHYSICALLY REMOVED! Where? Do not ask, if you do not want to join the ride!"
Interesting, I'm not sure I've ever come across this one.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Alright, thanks for the feedback.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I get that this is intended as a self-deprecating joke, but it's the sort of joking-not-joking that reads like it's also yes.jpg.
It's neither. This is either getting lost in the gaps between our cultures, or the speech-to-text nature of the internet so I'll be blunt. It's me saying you're being a jerk, and Go Away.
Remarkably, when I complain about SJWs my writing drastically improves, my arguments are unassailable and we're all great friends. If I'm writing about immigration, guns or other touchy subjects, you pop up with a list of standards that the majority of top-level posts, let alone replies, come nowhere near meeting. Yet you never seem particularly upset with much more inflammatory and low-effort right-wing takes.
I've tried to keep an open mind and I appreciate the breadth of your knowledge, but frankly, the criticism isn't constructive anymore (if it ever was) and I don't enjoy the back and forth at this point. Gonna have to do what I do and ghost after this.
There are a number of Grand Positive Visions on the general 'right', with the libertarian ones being the most-generally-known and most-generally-critiqued.
I'd argue that there were, but that times they have a'changed over the last 6 years. Trump was as profligate as the democrats and aligned more with them on i.e. covid relief welfare than his party to great acclaim from his base. The Tea Party is a joke, mostly revealed as a means to stymie Obama's legislative agenda rather than any real desire amongst conservatives to reduce spending. Libertarian and evangelical Christian ideals don't hold the same pull they once did, the Republican party is in flux, and a new vision has yet to emerge. Like...David French having a vision widespread among modern conservatives? The guy who writes in support of prosecuting Trump and how Trumpism has been a disaster for the American evangelical? When's the last time Breitbart or Fox News were meaningfully influenced by any of the ideologies you mentioned? I'm sure there are many Christians on the right, but to suggest that Christian morals is the animus of the modern conservative just isn't true anymore.
Even within those limits of the medium, I don't think extrapolating from posters responding to a top-level comment clearly trying to evoke sympathy for their political enemies under norms they've never avowed is going to be a particularly good place to go hunting for examples of grand positive vision...
Ah, yes, because my entire argument was based on that one comment thread. Speaking of limitations of that medium.
And I think that an emphasis you've selected -- "vibe you get" from "conservatives here", selected from the posts you read -- leaves far too many degrees of freedom.
I do that to 1) try and be less inflammatory because clearly it's a touchy subject and 2) because if I didn't couch my argument in 'I thinks' and 'vibes' you'd be ranting about how ridiculous it is that I have so much confidence in such a stupid argument with no citations. You'll be critical whichever choice I make short of just not writing anything, so why should I engage?
Not because I think WhiningCoil specifically spends a lot of wordcount on positive vision (even if you could steelman one)
He got 40 upvotes for saying that he has no morals anymore. I think we can drop the ridiculous charade that anyone is upvoting based on post quality rather than what they agree with, so it's frankly hilarious and pathetic that so many of you agree with that. And it's not even like that's the only example I could dig up! You're trying to avoid confronting that fact by prevaricating about the medium, or I'm looking in the wrong place, or scare quotes around 'vibes' and 'conservatives around here.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
For the record, I wrote 30,000 some odd words about that post and related topics with gattsuru already, hence my frustration at being told I'm guilty of ghosting. I was banned for a day and then took a month or two off from writing anything on the sub after that.
I've since also written 30,000 odd words in multiple conversations with FCfromSSC that you could dig up if you're so inclined. I don't think the other two people I specifically called out would be particularly interested in doing the same, but if they really want to rehash it, I'm willing.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
interpretation of the matter change if there was a way for people to express "I disagree with this post, but I'm upvoting because it's honest"?
It would, I'm just skeptical that this is the case. I doubt those 40 people feel as strongly as OP did, but they're sympathetic to someone literally saying they're so angry about politics that they have no morals left. Which...concerns me.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Okay, Steven Pinker! The liberal project isn't the one I'm worried about failing on every count; it's the progressive one, and the way that those two are separating.
Then by what metrics would you like to judge the success or failure of the progressive project? Female GDP per capita is outstripping that of men, as is their education level. The number of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies has gone up 15 fold in the last quarter century. Fraction of Asian and Hispanic CEOs have both roughly doubled in the same time. Difficult to measure things like inclusion, awareness, so on and so forth, but I imagine many kinds of speech not deemed 'progressive' are absent from the workplace relative to 2000. Congress is much more representative than it was. We have minor improvements like wellness/pumping rooms, changing stations, improved accessibility for disabled people, so on and so forth.
Until the pipeline problem is fixed from kindergarten on up, AA is going to keep failing and reinforcing its opponents' opinions that the results aren't the point. It's convenient, because college admissions have minimal oversight until you're Harvard-levels of egregious, but it's not effective.
I'm not convinced this is the case. I could be completely missing the mark here, but my impression is that China is much more matter-of-fact about differences in ability between individuals. They nevertheless straight up give bonus points on the gaokao to minorities among other things. I'm not well versed enough in Chinese culture to confidently say this is true rather that government propaganda, but I think it's an interesting model nonetheless. I don't think affirmative action is necessarily rooted in or dependent on blank slatism, nor do I think it's success should necessarily be measured by equality of outcomes (as I assume you mean when you say AA is failing).
And this is true in podunk coalfields and in minority-majority urban/suburban neighborhoods, but only one of those gets the attention of AA advocates.
I'd support and prefer class-based affirmative action.
And I don't really know how you're drawing the connection, or where you'd draw the separation, between them in a way that would make this conversation go better.
Some people here want me to defend the liberal project starting with FDR, others with Carter, still others with Obama. FCfromSSC likes to bring up an ex-domestic terrorist who was blowing up mailboxes in the 70s only to be hired as a professor in the 90s, and my man, I'm sorry but those bombs were going off long before I was born.
Like, where can I get the movement that says let's house the poor, let's treat drug addiction in a way that ends it, let's improve schooling any way possible, but also, whiteness is not a disease and maybe some activities are best left behind closed doors? Maybe you think the whiteness thing is an acceptable overreaction, or that it's not serious enough to be concerned about, but I think it's both easily avoided and incredibly dangerous to ignore.
Why don't you found it? I find people more receptive when they're convinced you care about the same outcomes as them, and just think you have a better way to achieve them.
I don't think it's serious enough to be concerned about insofar as I doubt I need to worry about mobs invading my neighborhood to lynch white people. I think the real problem is that it doesn't seem to be particularly useful for improving the outcomes of minorities, while simultaneously making significant fractions of the populace hostile to any kind of diversity/equity talk.
Edit to add: I think Alan Jacobs is being an uncharitable, obnoxious jackass in that linked post, but I also think that because of that, he might be the kind of conservative you might want to check in on occasionally
Thanks, I'll try to take a look. Stuff can get lost in the shuffle, particularly if it's not a substack sending me regular emails (I gave up on my RSS feed about a decade ago, but maybe the blog is undergoing a renaissance and I should reevaluate).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Why haven’t scientists bred immune-weakened birds or monkeys to test the longterm cost/benefit of vaccine?
Can you specify what you mean by 'immune-weakened birds or monkeys' and what experiments you'd like to run?
Generally speaking, gene editing monkeys is very rare and not done as a routine matter of course. The resources required put it outside the reach of the vast majority of academic labs. Birds are even less-researched than monkeys or other mammalian animal models by several orders of magnitude. They are also very, very rarely used for research in the way you're describing, have very significant differences in their immune systems relative to mammals, and are probably inappropriate for what is my best guess at the experiment you want to do. Gene editing of mice or cell lines is done routinely, so more or less anything you can think of genetically is possible. I would guess that your best bet on this front is probably still epidemiological data.
At this point, doing any efficacy studies on the vaccine is very difficult. It's better than being COVID-19 naive (i.e. never infected), but there are virtually none of those people left in most countries of the world. If your comparison is previously infected vs. vaccinated there (as far as I'm aware) doesn't seem to be a meaningful difference in outcomes. This may change if they update the vaccines to actually target the variants people are being infected with.
I still haven't seen any convincing data for safety concerns with the mRNA vaccines, minus the extremely rare myocarditis/anaphylaxis after vaccination or the development of anti-PEG antibodies.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
The initial billing was in respect to a virus that is now extinct. The vaccines were super effective against the original strain of COVID. If we had managed to roll them out globally in March of 2021, COVID would likely have been eradicated.
No, there's no way. Far, far too many animal reservoirs, and even when the vaccines were effective the longevity of the immunity was too short. Then there's the question of whether there would have been a similar number of cases but a much higher proportion of asymptomatic ones (i.e. the debate over whether the vaccine actually provided sterilizing immunity or just decreasing symptoms below the threshold of detectability).
Maybe if we had remarkably broad monitoring procedures (not feeling great? Swab in your bathroom, stick it in this tube and get same-day next gen sequencing!) that sounded the alarm much sooner after a new pathogen emerges we could prevent it. The experience from this pandemic killed that idea for a generation or two, though.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
When a kid ends up graduating barely able to read or do basic math, what are they going to do from there?
Likely not much. But it sounds like you're asking about what to do with the lowest strata of society rather than two overlapping normal distributions of academic achievement, no? Nudge the scores of one distribution as the Chinese do on the Gaokao and you're closer to 'equity,' per the progressive goals.
Graduating a bunch of unprepared students, giving them bonus points on applications so they can go to college unprepared and jobs unprepared, hardly seems like doing them a favor. Unless we're going whole-hog on a social signaling explanation?
You're asking me to step fairly far outside my areas of expertise so what follows is likely rooted in my biases rather than reality, but I'll try.
Probably half-hog. The receptionists at my company have college degrees. How is that anything other than welfare for white people who can afford to go to college and get bullshit degrees?
Then there is another (albeit small) class of jobs where I think accurate representation of the racial diversity of the population is inherently important for stability: federal, state and local politicians would all fall under this umbrella. Likely police and bureaucrats. I'm very hesitant to include positions like judges, but I think the argument could be made.
But even if you're correct and forcing diversity quotas on these positions would make our society significantly less efficient, ask yourself: is it worse for society to reduce the average MCAT/GRE/LSAT/???? scores of doctors/engineers/whatever by some number of points, or to have a group of chronic, racially segregated undercasts that periodically riot and defect on society because they feel like it's abandoned them? m
It's remarkable how most of what I wrote applies to both African Americans and poor rural whites, yet the right and left favor one or the other. Point to /r/stupidpol I guess.
I'm pretty sure radio broadcasts about cockroaches came well before Rwanda got seriously bad (though that built on decades and centuries of tribal conflict), and Hitler had several years of power and propaganda before Kristallnacht.
Both are instances of much larger majorities showing violent tendencies to much smaller minority populations, which is the inverse of the situation in America. Genocide is much less of a concern to me (in America, of course) than politically-motivated sectarian violence, which is why I get twitchy when people start hinting about all the guns they have or AR-15 wielding proud boys start convoying around Seattle or antifa members start shooting rando conservatives.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Are the left-leaning posters all riled up because it's Christmas and everything is plastered in Christian iconography or something? Or are you just a troll?
The reason they should be killed is to prevent them from harming more people, and to make sure that the bad genes that they hold that make them predisposed to bad behavior are not propagated into the next generation. Likewise, some people are born with an evil sense of morality that makes them predisposed to being fascists and reactionaries (yes, trad morality is illiberal and thus evil, it is a result of moloch) including religious ones (which is basically fascism except even worse because they scare people with made up notions about the afterlife, hence the term 'christofascist'), and other forms of anti liberal people.
So in the last 60 years has the decline in 'christofascists' been due to brave warriors like you exterminating them from the gene pool? I mean...those people are passing on their 'bad' genes at least as, if not more, frequently than secular folks. It's almost like...there's a strong environmental component!
Not to mention the hilarious lack of self-awareness behind 'My opponent's ideology is so toxic we must kill them before they can tell anyone about it or reproduce.' If anything, people like you who (if you aren't a troll of course) soberly cheer for conflict theory and ethnic cleansing are the true dangers to society.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Don't mistake eloquence and verbosity for truth and just roll over and abandon your point because people posted 15 links to their extensive post histories from the last three years. There's a steelman to be had for things aren't as bad as the terminally online make them out to be, that liberalism has been remarkably successful and is worth fighting for, and that this is still the best time and place to be alive bar none.
It's easy to paint a grim picture of liberalism and the West when it's failures are trumpeted to the heavens while it's successes are the water we swim in.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
On the other hand, would you agree that Liberalism has in fact made promises?
Sure, although it's probably changed some over the centuries and depending who you ask.
If so, what specific promises do you recognize being made, and how do you think they've turned out? Is education a reasonable area to start with?
If you let me take credit for everything since the enlightenment and French/American revolutions, it seems like an easy answer; look at literacy rates, STEM knowledge in the populace (what fraction of 19th century mill workers could tell you the Pythagorean theorem or that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, I wonder?), and, at the risk of Goodharting myself, High school/college/doctoral diplomas. If you're slightly more stringent, you could control for general 'progress' by comparing these metrics with 'illiberal' countries, and I expect we'd outperform them over the last several hundred years. If you insist on controlling for disparities in wealth, well, aren't you conceding to some degree that liberalism has some comparative advantage?
At the risk of sounding high-school-essay-level trite, liberalism promises self-determination; the right to choose one's spouse, one's religion, one's vocation. It promises political self-determination, free speech, so on and so forth.
Much of the criticism put forth below is less about the ideals and goals of liberalism, and rather instances of failed execution. Freedom of X is important, but people didn't really believe in it. You could be handed stone tablets laying out God's flawless ideology for humanity, and if Jimbo down the street decides to covet his neighbor's wife, we're still out of luck. If you'd argue that theory is all well and good but we're consequentialists damnit, much like Winston Churchill on democracy, it still seems like western liberal democracies are getting better results.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Last night, I turned on NPR in the car and listened to some guy expound about how the last 20 years of Ukrainian history are entirely the West's fault as we supported neo-nazis and genocide in the Donbas. Depending on the political party in power, half the country and media ecosystem is in hysterics about FEMA death camps/alt-right neonazis/excessive taxation/insufficient taxation/so on and so forth.
This morning, I open up globaltimes.cn and read about how Actually, China's COVID response has been entirely rational, orderly and planned this way from the beginning by our hyper-competent, divinely ordained leadership.
Criticism is good, criticism and awareness of our failures is important to (try and) hold politicians accountable and identify problems to be solved. We've blown way past that to screaming from the rooftops and rending our clothes about Trump lowering the corporate tax rate/Obamacare/children in cages/whatever outrage you want to pick that we promptly forgot as the news cycle churned over. Nobody bothers to defend the West anymore; it's imperialistic, misogynistic, anti-white, anti-black, antipathic to the middle and lower classes, exploitative of labor, sclerotic, bureaucratic, autocratic, whatever you want it to be man. Someone's gotta pick up the standard - we may not be improving lives as much as we were a half-century ago, but as far as I can tell, nobody else is doing better and this is still the system to emulate for innovation and human progress.
To your other post:
Sure! As long you're upholding their principles, rather than deconstructing them in hopes of delivering something even better. But it seems we're way past that point.
Someday, I'm sure humanity will come up with something better. I'm not going to buy into the hubris of the End of History and claim that we've solved the problem guys, it's liberal democracies all the way down and all we need to care about is execution. But like I said, I don't see anything better in the marketplace of ideas at the moment.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You're rapidly going to outstrip my knowledge of history and philosophy. I was (un)fortunate enough to attend a college that let me avoid anything that wasn't a science class. No liberal arts education where I'm from.
Are liberalism/the Enlightenment the same thing, in your view? Connected things? Entirely separate things?
I may be about to reveal my ignorance, but I associate the Enlightenment with a period of history and liberalism with a political/social philosophy. I suppose 'Enlightenment values' may have significant overlap with liberalism, but I imagine the latter has developed significantly in the past few centuries.
Is the US a liberal democracy? Was it one prior to the civil rights act? Prior to suffrage? Prior to the abolition of slavery? If we reversed some or all of these policies tomorrow, would we still be a "liberal democracy"? Is "liberal democracy" applied based on objective criteria, or do we judge a nation relative to its contemporaries?
It's not a binary, thus the need for 'democracy indices' and the like. As well argue whether Jefferson was a racist/abolitionist, JK Rowling a feminist, so on and so forth.
As for absolute versus relative scales, why not both? I'm humble enough to expect that my descendants will think me barbaric in one way or another, which in turn makes me more sympathetic towards my forebears. Nevertheless, chattel slavery seems like an objectively open-and-shut case for us to judge, no?
I'd answer yes to all of those questions, but each step was an improvement in degree rather than a categorical change.
More to the point, do we label based on the ideological approach to policy, or do we judge based on the policies chosen and their outcomes?
Both. Everything in moderation, including consequentialism and deontology.
The Soviets promised most of the things on that list, claimed to be motivated by Enlightenment principles while doing it, and insisted strenuously that they were delivering. Of course, we know they were "illiberal" thanks to hindsight, despite the fact that most of their unimpeachably liberal contemporaries completely failed to recognize that fact for a generation or two. Do you see the problem?
Yes, but your argument cuts both ways. The Crusades, witch trials and inquisitions, antisemitism/islamophobia, all the sectarian conflicts through the centuries. People have done twisted things in the name of ideology...since the development of language, I imagine? Insofar as your goal is to elevate Christianity at the expense of a secular Enlightenment, I'm not buying it. If you're trying to reduce the argument to a relativistic 'Well, everyone does bad things sometimes, ideology isn't all that important after all' I think you have a stronger leg to stand on, but I still disagree.
We're trying to boil massively complex systems down to four axes; Christian/non-Christian and liberal/illiberal. Clearly we'll never explain the variance in every society, but regardless, I still think there's a signal in the noise insofar as liberal democracies are concerned. Perhaps the biodeterminists are correct, and the US is successful due to superior genetic stock. Or Jared Diamond, /r/badhistory darling, has the right of it and the US would have ascended purely by dint of it's natural resources, livestock, etc etc. You'd like to believe Christianity has been a force for good in the world as it flatters your biases, I prefer a secular one as it flatters mine. How could we ever definitively answer that question? The 'winner' of this debate would likely be based on the intellect/knowledge/effort of it's participants rather than any objective underlying truth.
The problem with this is that Enlightenment ideology has repeatedly resulted in wildly illiberal outcomes, and the most successful "liberal" societies have not actually hued very closely to Enlightenment ideology in a number of very important ways, among them a deep and abiding connection to the Christian faith. I note that societies that lacked or removed this connection in favor of pure Enlightenment ideology did very, very badly indeed, and I note that as Christian faith has passed the tipping point into serious decline, even anglosphere countries have found themselves in a protracted crisis of rising illiberalism.
How about those Soviets? Their RETVRN to traditional Christian values hasn't exactly sparked a Golden Age. Not to mention the piles of nominally Christian nations resulting in wildly unchristian outcomes.
You look at a half century of evaporating church membership and associate that with 'decline.' Meanwhile, the generation that came of age in that time witnessed the triumph of the west in the cold war, unprecedented wealth creation and improved outcomes nearly across the board. Are we just coasting on the religiosity of the Greatest generation?
Furthermore, the supposedly more liberal United States of a hundred years ago, while undeniably more Christian, was not particularly well-disposed towards Islamic/Chinese immigrants, Catholics, etc.
The Enlightenment is certainly one of the sources American Culture has drawn from, but it has drawn even more heavily from others; when it comes time to tally benefits and harms, all the benefits are tallied to the Enlightenment, whether it caused them or not, and all the harms are tallied to the others, whether they were responsible for them or not. Then too, one can simply ignore or define away harms in the present, and likewise for benefits in the past; history is just writing, after all, and statistics are famously malleable. I think the above is how the liberal triumphalism you're describing is generated, and I think it's a fair start at describing why it is doomed to collapse.
It's a fair criticism, and the road to stagnation is paved with complacency/triumphalism. Moar liberalism and 'Getting out the vote' is not the cure to every problem in our society, nor am I arrogant enough to think that liberal democracies will be the law of the land until the heat death of the universe.
But if you actually want to change someone's beliefs, you need to offer them an alternative. I believe that much of the good in the West (universal suffrage, literacy, unalienable rights, etc) represents progress in the same way that walking -> chariot -> automobile -> airplane does, regardless of it's provenance. I believe that in the postwar period, a group of great statesmen and bureaucrats had a vision rooted in...enlightenment/Christian values and were really Onto Something. Since then, much of the world has copied our playbook and caught up to varying degrees. I don't believe this represents decline; rather, it's just an opportunity to hit on the next civilizational phase change...which undoubtedly will take progressives of one flavor or another.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You'll know a message is shouted from the rooftops when you can get in trouble for disagreeing with it. If you get fired, blacklisted in an industry, debanked, or arrested, or if alphabet agencies have taskforces dedicated to scrubbing or throttling your disagreement from the internet. If you are looking at spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to put your daughter into a private religious school for a religion you don't believe in, in the hopes of turning down the volume of the message, it's probably being shouted from the rooftops. But the things you pointed at are just background noise.
I'd agree that institutional power has swung fairly far in one direction in the past decade and can sympathize, but 1) my point is much broader than the superficial culture war topics du jour and 2) there's plenty of places in this country where the messaging is very different.
It will fly or fall on it's own, and thus have no claim to the successes of liberalism, even if it does turn out to surpass it. Likewise people who are arguing for violating liberal principles now in order improve society, even as they call themselves liberals from the other side of their mouth, shouldn't get to claim the successes of liberalism. To be clear, I don't think you're doing it, though I may have been poking you to find out if you will.
Or, it may very well build on the successes of liberalism and improve on them in a linear fashion. People may, in your view, violate liberal principles in some instances while still adhering to them more broadly - does a liberal who supports a free press, open markets and some restrictions on hate speech get to lay claim to the benefits of the liberal tradition? How about a MAGA-conservative who's a hardline free speecher, adamant supporter of freedom of religion in every instance, but agitates for tariffs and protectionism?
Dogmatic adherence to liberal principles in every instance is both impossible and likely undesirable. I recognize this facilitates an easy slide into...well, many Bad Places, but regardless, at the end of the day, we're going to have to hash it out and work together to compromise rather than dusting off the sacred texts of liberalism to answer every question. Dogmatic pursuit of Free Trade may not be optimal when some other countries are mashing defect. Unlimited free speech may not be the way to go in burning theaters.
I'll grant you that we're a little bit more subtle about it than authoritarian states, but as the past few years are showing, it's not that our rulers are allowing criticism as a matter of principle, they're not even allowing it pragmatically on the off chance that us plebs might have a good point every once in a while, and it would be unwise to shut us up.
Can you be more specific what you mean by 'us plebs might have a good point every once in a while?' Does this mean you want us to elect plebs to congress, that you want your elites to be more responsive to what you want, that elites are by and large correct but now and then the plebs know better and should be listened to? Although in the latter case, I'd also ask how you expect us to know when the plebs have the right of it.
I don't believe that we're perfect, nor do I take excessive comfort in being better than the authoritarian states. In an America where everybody was extolling the virtues of our Glorious Leaders, I would be shouting from the rooftops about corruption and overseas military adventures. Instead, I believe we live in an America where nobody, ever can suggest that our government might have done something good without turning heads. I have enough humility to recognize that on 99% of the issues put before Congress, I'm truly ignorant, and maybe, just maybe, they might know something after all their briefings and committee meetings that I don't.
But it's a fine line to tread between trusting your reps, and turning a blind eye to corruption, eh?
That's another classic. The issue here is that when you start on top, and have a long way to fall, you might be able to use "nobody else is doing better" as an excuse for a very long time, even as things are getting obviously worse. Hell, if the whole world is becoming more authoritarian, you might be able to claim you're "liberal" even after installing a dictator, simply because the other dictators are worse.
It's less an argument about the current state of affairs in America being peachy, and more that I don't think I've seen a superior successor ideology rapidly outstripping us in terms of outcomes that I would consider endorsing over western-flavored liberal democracy.
By the way, has your worldview changed somewhat recently? I might be misremembering your comments from the old place, but I've been doing some double takes reading you lately. I seem to be getting the vibe of just a bit more sympathy for the dissidents? Not that you agree with us, just that we're not insane for complaining.
I'd be lying (not to mention ashamed) to say that my views haven't changed over the last several years, but I believe my overall shtick has been the same. I've always had sympathy for conservatives angry at the system in the same way I've had sympathy for Blacks. I aim to balance arguing for what I believe in with further alienating left and right. I don't enjoy social media or writing long forum screeds and I lurked in various forums for twenty odd years before finally participating here out of a sense of civic duty (although I admit sometimes I make myself laugh), which undoubtedly is part of why many find me insufferable.
So no, I don't think and have never thought that you're insane. I think we have common ground in disapproving of small children hanging out with strippers and many other areas, and believe that we can have mutually respectful dialogue where we disagree.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It might be a sign of how bad things got, or of me going off the deep end, but I don't know if I even believe in these "directions" and things swinging in them anymore.
MIT just published a free speech manifesto that would have gotten people crucified a few years ago. The FBI is claiming that demand for white supremacy outstrips supply. I don't think the pendulum is going to swing back to some evangelical Christian theocracy, but I think the worst ideas of the last decade will be curbed and the pressure will relax. Trump 2024 being the wild card...
If I understand you correctly, you seem to believe that all this culture war is a distraction from all the important stuff like tax policy, healthcare, foreign policy, some aspects of education, etc. - things that determine how a country is actually run. I say, to hell with all that!
I'm not sure I'd be so dismissive as to call it a distraction, but I see the culture war as a block (or more cynically, a lever) used to pit us against each other. I believe there are clear, positive-sum, winning policies we could adopt on many of those issues if we could react to proposals from the other side with something less than rabid, all-consuming hatred and default opposition. And failing that, at least work out compromises.
I don't know if I have a way to distill what I'm frantically gesturing at into a single principle, but if I had to, I'd call it something like preventing the 1984-ification and drowification of our society. Rat-racing, backstabbing, and maybe even memory-holing have always existed to some extent, but it got way out of hand in the past decade.
What do you think needs to happen to promote cooperation rather than backstabbing/defecting on society?
Well then, we're right back to the End of History, aren't we? It's just Liberalism with a tweak or two.
Maybe, maybe not. We have the means at hand for much more participation in the political process than the Founders did; virtually every citizen carries around a device that could instantaneously be used to vote in referenda. Our citizens are more literate, more educated and more knowledgeable than they've ever been in history. Or, despite this, you may want to restrict participation in specific referenda to citizens sufficiently knowledgeable about a specific subject matter...but then the issue becomes preventing people from gaming the system (i.e. if you're a neo-Republican/Democrat, here are the answers to the quiz they will ask you before you can vote, recruiting people to a cause, activists trying to insert questions primed to only let the right type of person vote, etc). The system described in Too Like the Lightning has always struck me as interesting as well - a small number of nation-states unbound by geographical location that you opt-into, forcing them to compete aesthetically and materially for members.
The development of ever-more-impressive models makes me wonder if at some point, a centrally planned economy run by an oracular AI would start to be able to outperform the free market.
Would these just be minor tweaks to Liberalism, or a sea change in society? I can see any of these being transformative and potentially outperforming groups that stick with the old formula.
If you openly promise free press, open markets and some restriction on hate speech, and people support that, that's well and good. If after that a newspaper publishes an article you don't like, and you start dicking around with their ability to reach an audience, you don't get to use the fuzziness of the concept to pretend you're still upholding your promise.
Fair enough. I assume you're referring to something like google deprioritizing conservative media in search functions rather than some media organization encouraging true believers to slaughter the infidels.
"Us plebs might have a good point every once in a while", is a more cynical take, where the will of the people doesn't really enter the picture. The elites do mostly what they want, not what the people who they represent want.
I think there's a number of distinctions to be made here. There's a beneficent paternalism, where the plebs want something really fucking stupid or two clearly contradictory things, and the elites ignore it to take (what they think is) the better option. There's a parasitic antisocial option, where the elites actively pass legislation that will help them extract wealth and resources from the plebs, ossify their own power, or just harm the populace because sadism. And you could imagine a situation where we elect representatives, and they simply vote directly as their constituents would want based on how popular any given issue is in their state (but then why have representatives in the first place?).
I assume all of these are simultaneously happening, although I also expect that #2 is significantly less common than people seem to think - I just don't believe conflict theory is widespread in American politics, particularly at the higher levels of government.
I largely agree with the rest of your points. Where I mostly disagree with you is seeing intentionality or conspiracies on the left formed with the aim of punishing you or yours. I can sometimes see how it could come across that way to you (rhetoric from the LGBT community about coming for your kids, etc etc), but other times I've been closer to ground zero and have largely only met people with good intentions. Whether that generalizes to other fields or I'm just being naive.../shrug.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable.
You know, I've written and erased about a dozen half-formed comments on the topic, but...here we go. It's not clear to me whether you mean heritable in the scientific or colloquial sense; if the former, then literally any trait is heritable because you'll get a number for a trait, even if it's 0.1% heritable versus 99.9% environmental influence. If you meant it colloquially, in that our religious beliefs are inherited from our parents genetically, then so far as I can tell this is emphatically false.
Lewis and Bates (2013) describe a heritability of 26% for religiosity, in line with what they claim as a previously described range of 30-45%. Note that this study was done in a US population that is >90% white and 85% Christian. Majority of participants were aged 25-74 in 1995, so boomers and older which explains how their sample population was 85% Christian in a country that is currently only 70% Christian; I'm impressed by how fertile atheist and agnostic people have been over the last thirty years, but I digress.
Here are another pair of studies, one describing a heritability of 27%, the other 60%. The latter seems to be the outlier that is the source of the higher heritability claims, but critiquing the methods of either to potentially explain the difference is beyond me. If anyone is more familiar with the math/methods involved, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
Many other papers cite a paywalled textbook chapter by a certain Thomas Bouchard; however, I did find this review he wrote where he claims the heritability of religiosity is 30-45% while the heritability of a specific religion is near zero. Anecdotally, this makes sense from the old Dawkins argument that the God you believe in is arbitrarily determined by the country you're born into, as well as the dozens of children of devout Muslim/Hindu immigrants I've met whose religious beliefs are nothing like their parents.
In other words, no, your religious beliefs are absolutely not genetically heritable in the way that (I think) you are claiming. Depending on the study, environmental influences range from being as important to 2-3 times more important than genetics. And the idea that if you ran the Lord of the Flies experiment version 2.0 but provided the children with a Quran, Bible, Torah and other religious texts they would unerringly choose the religion of their parents is ludicrous on it's face.
Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool?
I disagree. I think the community has overcorrected far too much towards inflating the importance of complex trait genetics which remain very poorly understood. That's not to say genetics don't matter, but what you call 'race formation' is very far from the only viable option for civilization building. If humans in antiquity had decided to invent eugenics rather than writing, we never would have made as much progress as we have now. Improvements in AI, synthetic augmentation (neuralink, etc) and social organization could very well eclipse anything you could accomplish with assortative mating given ~25-35 year generation times even if you managed to get everyone on board and biology works as well as you think it will. Genetics matters, what people refer to as blank slatism is false, but a myopic obsession with bloodlines is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It is in real life, but they're presenting it as two options for EAs to choose from.
You're missing the point because you're too focused on waging the culture war and winning object level arguments about how bad the outgroup is. All of those things could be true and still orthogonal to the point I'm making.
Yes! Much closer.
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